


i've been seeing angels in my living room

by cloudywithachanceofme



Series: a marvelous universe [1]
Category: Captain Marvel (2019), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: 1990s, Air Force, Alternate Universe - 1990s, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amnesia, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Depression, Developing Relationship, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Heimdall's Eyes, James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark Friendship, James "Rhodey" Rhodes Feels, James "Rhodey" Rhodes Needs a Hug, Louisiana, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Not Captain Marvel (2019) Compliant, POV James "Rhodey" Rhodes, Past Carol Danvers/Maria Rambeau - Freeform, Pre-Captain Marvel (2019), Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:34:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26549824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudywithachanceofme/pseuds/cloudywithachanceofme
Summary: The year is 1995. Rhodey has grown used to the ghosts that plague his life, when a man, that is both familiar and new, crashlands in his backyard and sets off a series of events that change'll the very fate of the galaxy.ORRhodey, Heimdall, and Maria kickstart the mcu...thirteen years early.
Relationships: Carol Danvers/Maria Rambeau, Heimdall/James "Rhodey" Rhodes, James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark, Maria Rambeau & James "Rhodey" Rhodes
Series: a marvelous universe [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1930729
Comments: 3
Kudos: 3





	i've been seeing angels in my living room

**Author's Note:**

> Hi!!! Sooo I have a pretty good idea of where I want this to go. Later down the line, several characters will see a bigger presence in the story, and I'll tag them as such later on. And the summary is not a shitpost, this is my rendition of the mcu. Since this is the '90s, this means some people either won't yet exist (like Peter Parker or Kamala) or will be significantly younger (like T'Challa or Mantis), so that will have an effect on how the story goes.  
> Aside from that, I'm not a big comic reader, but I have heard of a story of Heimdall having amnesia and getting lost in Louisiana, and that's basically the basis for this fic lol. In the comic, Heimdall's name was apparently Ezra, and that's what he'll be known as for the first part of the story or so.  
> hddjndjnckjdncjkdn depeneding on how well this does, I might do spin-off stories, heavy emphasis on the might.  
> And without further ado, let's get into the story 😚😚😚.

He pulls up at the house just a little after five, catching the lingering flashes of sun illuminating the night sky like a lamp in a dimly lit room. The porch is empty, with neither Monica nor Maria in sight, and Carol, obviously, is nowhere to be seen. 

Pushing  _ that _ thought aside, Rhodey crawls out of the car, then gently parks it beside the Mustang that hasn’t been used in months and starts towards the house. The wood of the porch creaks underneath his weight, and the clumsily made wind chimes strewn from the roof crinkle in their own symphony. Complete with the sound of wind rustling through the grass, it makes for quite a nice soundtrack for the backroads*. Rhodey takes a moment to let it envelop him, humming to himself, then pulls open the screen door and steps into the house. 

The A/C’s out again, trapping the sweltering heat of late summer within the walls of the house. But still. It’s nice to be out from underneath the scorching, setting sun. 

He finds Maria in the kitchen, wearing the same, ratty bathrobe she’s been wearing for the past month and staring solemnly into the bowl of cereal in front of her. As he approaches, he can’t help but notice that it’s long since gone smushy and hasn’t been touched. 

_ “Mom’s been...sad since Auntie Carol died” _ , Monica had explained when he first moved in with them. Maria may put on a brave face for her, but little Nicki’s always been a perceptive one. 

“Looks appetizing”, Rhodey greets lightly, pausing by the fridge to pour some lemonade into a plastic cup. 

Maria lifts her eyes to meet his gaze for but a moment, then looks back down to her bowl and murmurs, “It is...think the Cheerios are stale, though”.

Rhodey stands by the fridge and sips idly at his lemonade as he continues to watch her, worry digging a special place out in his gut. A few weeks ago, he thought she’d been feeling better, but it didn’t last longer than a few days. Now, she seems worse than ever before. 

He downs the last of his drink, then slips a hand into his pocket and approaches her. He drops an envelope of money onto the table, then pushes it over to her. 

“I know I’m behind on rent”, he says when Maria just blinks confusedly at the envelope.

Her face seems to sag with exhaustion as she quietly says, “Oh. Right”. She reaches across the table, and it’s then that Rhodey notices the bandages constricted about her arm, slivers of charred, brown skin peeking from underneath. 

_ God, please, tell me she’s been changing them. _

Maria murmurs a quiet, emotionless “Thanks”, then rises to her feet in pursuit of the bathroom. The toilet flushes, and she returns a moment later to drop her bowl and spoon into the sink before sitting down back at the table. “Anything happen at the base today?”

“Penners was late to morning exercises, so we had to run six extra miles”, he offers with a tilt of his head. The smile Maria gives him is small, but it’s a smile all the same. Encouraged, Rhodey takes a seat opposite her and says, “I was talking to Hernandez today. He said the offer still stands if you want back in.”

For a moment, Maria is silent, merely staring out the window to their right, where a robin has perched outside the windowsill. It’s always there, this time of day. But in the coming months, when the temperature drops, it will leave, and their window will be all the more lonely. Maria averts her eyes just as the robin takes flight, and she inhales sharply, fingers at her temples as she mumbles, “Well, you tell him that’s okay. I uh. I don’t think I’m ready to go back yet”.

“...Okay.” Rhodey tosses his cup into the trash can beside them, then turns back to face her, his hand propped up in his chin as he says, “There’s a screening of The Car tonight, just off County Road. We could drive on up there and-”.

“No.” She closes her eyes, takes in her breath raggedly, and bites her lip. “I-I think I’d rather stay in for the night.” Maria twirls her finger about a spot on the table, and Rhodey realizes, his heart sinking even further, that it’s the spot where Carol had left a hot pan at and burned away the wood. At the time, Maria had been annoyed, a fact only made worse at Carol’s smug insistence that it gave the table “character”. Now, more often than not, Rhodey catches her kneading at the charred spot and knows she’s living more in that moment than in the current.

“Maria”, he interjects sternly, staring at her until she at last looks up at him. “You need to get out of the house.” At the sigh she gives, he cuts in and says, “I’m serious. Nicki’s still staying over at her friend’s tonight, right?”

Maria just scratches at her bonnet, then shakes her head. “Yeah. She left about an hour ago.” “Then go out. Have a drink. Have fun.” Hell, when he first met them, Carol and Maria were the ones begging to drag him out to clubs. It’s almost jarring how their roles have reversed. 

Maria just shrugs, still poking at the charred table as she replies, “...Maybe”. He’s about to push further when she suddenly adds, “Tony called earlier”.

And Rhodey just freezes, staring uncomprehending at her before an empty “Oh” escapes him. This time, when Maria looks up from the table, she seems intrigued. He supposes he should count that as a blessing, but it’s almost certainly due to the fact that she’s a nosy bastard. “What-What’d he say?”

“Nothing.” Maria sits up slightly, eyes drifting over to the landline before she says, “He hung up before I could get a word in”. She’s quiet for a moment before, then asks, hesitant, “Did y’all have some kind of fight?” 

“...Yeah, you could say that.” These past few years, it’s been damn near impossible not to fight with Tony. He swears the guy just lives to aggravate the shit out of people.

But then his parents died. And his increasing downward spiral had turned into a full-blown hurricane. And when Rhodey told him he was getting a transfer to Louisiana…

It hadn’t exactly gone over well.

“I think he misses you”, Maria muses, and when Rhodey looks up, there’s a light in her eye to meet the mild smile upon her face.

“What makes you say that?”

“Cause he literally can’t go a second without being around people, least of all his best friend.” She brushes her fingers over the table one last time, then sighs and says, “And you miss him, too”.

“Yeah”, he admits begrudgingly. Tony’s an ass, especially when he’s drunk, but he’s still his best friend. And he usually comes through when Rhodey needs him, too. It’s just been a rough couple of years, for all of them. “I dunno. Maybe I’ll give him a call later.”

“Sounds good”, Maria hums. Tiredly, she pushes herself to her feet, picking the car keys off the counter as she goes. She lingers there a moment, staring at the keyring before she looks over her shoulder and tells him, “I think Imma go for a drive. Don’t call him ‘til I get back”.

Rhodey just snorts, standing and slipping his hands inside his pockets. “Okay. But take a shower first. You smell like shit.”

“What a man, what a man”, Maria says fondly, patting him on the cheek as she starts up the stairs. Rhodey just rolls his eyes, watching as she stalks out the door, turning around to wave goodbye before disappearing.

It’s not exactly a good mood. And he knows it isn’t likely to last. But it was nice to see her smile again.

“All right, Rhodes”, he mutters and soon finds himself standing at the back door. He stands there a moment, letting the warm, summer air drift over him before he breaks into a light jog. 

Within minutes, Rhodey finds himself consumed with his thoughts, his goal set on lapping the far off hayfield four times before retiring for the night. 

He’s midway through his second lap when he passes up a tractor. Unbidden, Tony comes to mind, along with the thought of the many pieces of machinery they’ve taken apart and put back together,  _ together _ . Rhodey’s pace slows, as the memory of their last argument echoes loud in his ears. 

_ Tony. _

They’ve never gone this long without talking to each other. Maybe when Rhodey was undercover or Tony deep in one of his projects but never because they weren’t on speaking terms. 

It’s weird. Even more than weird, it’s uncomfortable. Since that first day in college, Tony has always been there. Even when it felt like the ground was slipping from underneath his feet, when everything else was going to shit, when he couldn’t get a grapple on anything, Tony was always there.

And now he isn’t. And Rhodey’s so very tempted to just pick up the phone and say he isn’t mad anymore, but the thing is? He is still mad. He’s pissed. And he honestly doesn’t know what to do with it because he knows Tony won’t apologize for it. And if he doesn’t apologize, he doesn’t know where that’ll leave them.

The air’s growing muggy, the way it would just before a storm. Rhodey frowns, looking up and finding the sky to have grown tinted with dusk. He’s only just started his third lap, but he quickly turns around, his goal all but thrown away. It’s not safe to be out this late. Heaven forbid he get caught up in some Wrong Turn type of shit or catch the attention of a wandering racist. 

When he’s just half a mile away from the house, a great snap of thunder meets his ears, followed by a bolt of lightning splintering across the darkening sky. Rhodey looks around, eyes following the bolt to just above the forests. There’s a thick concentration of clouds, funnelling into what looks like a tornado.

He turns around to run, but it’s in that moment that the funnell suddenly and abruptly crashes into the earth. A burst of light, of swirling, furious rainbow, and the sky breaks apart, as if it’s a piece of fabric that’s been torn. The funnel swirls with color and soil, and Rhodey lifts an arm to shield his face, his feet rooted to the spot as the dust clears. 

And just like that, the funnel sucks back up to the sky, and it all disappears, leaving behind only a crater in the ground.

As he stands there, rethinking all the times he’s criticized people in movies that go check out sketchy shit, Rhodey hears a groan. His feet seem to move of his own accord, guiding him to the edge of the pit.

Within the pit, he finds a man lying in its center. Rhodey just stares a moment, deeply confused before he breathily calls out, “Hello?”

Groaning, the man opens his eyes, his  _ golden _ eyes, and looks up at him. Needless to say, he seems about as confused as Rhodey.

“Who”, Rhodey begins before trailing off, his breath escaping him. Once he’s found his wits, he turns his gaze back to the sky, staring, befuddled, then turns back to the man and takes in his appearance. He looks like something out of a medieval movie. His mind racing, Rhodey simply stares at the man and asks, “Who are you?”

The man just remains where he is, only now there is fear amongst his confusion. “I don’t know”.

: : :

Rhodey brings the man back to the house, just in time to see Maria closing the front door behind her. The perpetual cloud of weariness has returned, so when she sees Rhodey seated on the couch with a strange man, she just waves a tired hand at them and says, “Set him up on the couch. We’ll talk in the morning”.

Rhodey just watches her go, then turns back to the man. The man who, apparently, would like to go by “Ezra”. Not because that’s his name, no, he just likes the sound of it.

So Rhodey’s just opened his doors to Ezra, a man that just fell out of the sky. Could’ve been a wormhole, a portal through time, anytime, really. And here, Rhodey already thought his life was chaotic. “You want anything to eat?”, Rhodey asks, once the silence has officially verged into awkward.

“Yes”, Ezra says, and he looks so horribly out of place, decked out in golden armour, sitting on their cozy, little sofa. But more than anything, his eyes are what hold Rhodey’s attention. Where once they’d appeared golden, now they appear like a smoldering fire, a heady elixir that Rhodey could easily drown in. 

Rather than say any of that aloud, Rhodey rises to his feet, then joins Maria in the kitchen. He’s about to hurry away when Maria calls out his name. Wincing, he walks back towards her, his plate of hot pockets growing warm. 

“Listen, Rhodey”, Maria begins, sounding exhausted. “I know you’ve got a heart three times the size of Texas, and you know I love you, but we’re really gotta talk about this.”

Yeah, he’d been expecting that. Rhodey looks back out to where Ezra sits, bites his lip, and murmurs, “I figured”.

““I don’t care if he fell out of the sky or parted the fucking D'Arbonne”, Maria continues, showing more animation than he’s seen in months. “We don’t know this guy. Now, I got no problem letting him stay the night, but-”

“It’s just for the night”, Rhodey assures her. “I’m gonna take him to one of the shelters in the morning, see if they can hook him up. He’ll be gone before Nicki gets back, I’ll make sure of it.”

Maria just purses her lips. She eyes him intensely, seeming to search for something before asking, “Do you know him?”

That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? Rhodey has no recollection of ever seeing him before, doesn’t even recognize his voice. But when he helped Ezra out of the crater, he felt  _ something _ . Something like déjà vu, like a memory lost to time, like something just beyond his periphery. A current of electricity, passing between the two while Rhodey helped the other man to his feet, and when they were both on solid ground, Rhodey still felt miles high in the sky.

Then Ezra let go, and it was all gone.

“I don’t know”, Rhodey answers truthfully. 

He winds up driving Ezra to the shelter. Just before he goes, he grabs the pair of sunglasses off the dashboard and passes them to him. Ezra just stares at him, eyes like the cosmos eyeing him curiously before Rhodey explains, “So people won’t ask questions”.

“Thank you”, Ezra says, giving him a small smile, and his voice is so deep yet so soft, commanding his attention like only the sounds of Louisiana could.

“I’ll be back in the morning”, Rhodey says, his throat dry, then pulls off and starts back towards the house. 

In the rearview mirror, he can see storm clouds gathering on the horizon, along with Ezra’s retreating form into the shelter. 

**Author's Note:**

> title is a reference to the khalid song angels lol and feedback is always appreciated so don't be afraid to leave a comment or kudos, I always love to hear what y'all are thinking. Thanks for reading!


End file.
